


You Can’t Just “Walk Off” a Collapsed Lung, Neal!

by BabyGenius



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Nightwing (Comics), White Collar (TV 2009)
Genre: Court of Owls (mentioned), Dick Grayson is Neal Caffrey, Dick Grayson is a Talon, Former Talon Dick Grayson, Gen, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, I had so much fun, Identity Reveal, ME - Freeform, Neal Caffrey is Dick Grayson, Reveal, not me screaming about this idea, powers revealed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 19:55:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29846682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BabyGenius/pseuds/BabyGenius
Summary: “I’ll be fine,” Neal insisted. Peter choked, a knot building in his chest at the wheezing quality of Neal’s voice. “Just help me get off the bar and I’ll be fine.”“What—Neal you can’t—” Peter spluttered, searching for the right way to say ‘you can’t take the bar out you idiot it’s the only thing keeping the blood inside your body and probably your lung from collapsing too’in a way that was sympathetic to the shock Neal was probably experiencing.——aka Neal (Dick) is a former Talon who can’t die but gets fatally wounded while on a case with white collar, so the scene is basically “I’ll be fine” “Oh my god he’s dying” “I’ll befine” “*pretending to play into their delusions* Of course you will, you’ll be great”
Comments: 17
Kudos: 227





	You Can’t Just “Walk Off” a Collapsed Lung, Neal!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [impravidus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/impravidus/gifts).
  * Inspired by [couldn't decide if i should name this after "bring me back to life" by evanescence or "back to life" by rascal flatts. i know it's the exact same phrase but i know the difference in my heart.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29745999) by [impravidus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/impravidus/pseuds/impravidus). 



> Okay listen I _know_ this is neither of the WIPs I have, and I’m sorry but I had to. Ty to Impravidus for writing out my brain child and inspiring me to write my own version. Ilysm.
> 
> This was meant to be crack but it turned kinda serious (only a little) but that’s okay. Also I probably didn’t get the lore/history right please don’t come for me I don’t have access to comics. Hope you’re all doing well, enjoy!

Listen.

_Listen._

They did not _mean_ to get caught in a cave-in (or, well, a remote-building-collapse-in).

But did it happen?

Yes, yes it did.

“Neal? Diana? Jones?” Peter coughed out, blinking fiercely to try and clear the dust that had invaded them.

“Here, Peter,” Jones panted from somewhere off to Peter’s right.

“Here.” Diana dissolved into hacking coughs.

A moment.

“Neal!” Peter repeated in a panic. His head was killing him, something had fallen on it, and his wrist was sore from trying to protect his head.

“‘M here,” a weak voice choked out.

Peter hissed when Jones’ phone light illuminated the room with a dim white glow, dust still floating in the air. Jones was on the floor against a large piece of ceiling, clutching his ankle with one hand. Diana was off to Peter’s left, but she looked relatively fine and was covering the lower half of her face with her jacket to try and help her breathing.

Peter’s eyes cast around for Neal, and he froze when he found him. Neal was propped up halfway against a semi-caved-in wall, but there was a cylindrical _something_ going through his chest and it was somewhat hard to tell in the lighting but Peter could swear that was blood dripping from Neal’s mouth.

“Please tell me you just bit your tongue,” Jones gasped out, finding Neal not a second after Peter.

Neal huffed a laugh, wincing when it pulled at the bar. “No can do.”

“Oh, Neal,” Diana muttered, moving closer. Peter chided himself to kick his ass back in gear and followed her. Jones stayed where he was but centered the light on their area so they’d be able to see better.

“I’ll be fine,” Neal insisted. Peter choked, a knot building in his chest at the wheezing quality of Neal’s voice. “Just help me get off the bar and I’ll be fine.”

“What—Neal you can’t—” Peter spluttered, searching for the right way to say ‘ _you can’t take the bar out you idiot it’s the only thing keeping the blood inside your body and probably your lung from collapsing too’_ in a way that was sympathetic to the shock Neal was probably experiencing.

“Neal, the bar is keeping the blood inside your body. If we take it out you will bleed out,” Diana said, with the slow patient tone of someone who was injured and probably experiencing cognitive impairments.

Neal shook his head. “Promise, I’ll be fine.”

“Caffrey, you really shouldn’t move. It sounds like your lung might have collapsed and the bar is the only thing keeping it from completely collapsing,” Jones chided.

Neal laughed, a light, airy sound. “Already happened…Jones. I’d…really rather avoid the—the wound healing ‘round the bar… then it’ll jus’ be a bitch…ta get out.”

“Neal, don’t move the bar,” Peter ordered, his vision swimming.

Neal glared at him. He muttered something under his breath that Peter couldn’t catch before lurching forward. The three FBI agents around him cried out in surprise and concern, yelling at him to stop. Diana tried to force him to stay, but found that it was almost impossible to overpower him. He eventually slid off, his eyes clenched tight with pain and blood dribbling from his mouth down his chin and he leaned to the side and spat it out.

“Hate….coll’psed lungs,” Neal gasped. The light wavered as Jones’ hand trembled and Peter crawled forward. He didn’t know when he had wound up on the floor but he really didn’t feel like trying g to stand.

“Neal?” Peter asked cautiously.

Neal held up a hand. “Gimme…minute,” he huffed weakly, wiping at his chin and wincing when it pulled his chest.

Peter sat frozen with baited breath. He didn’t quite know what he was waiting for. The logical thing would be waiting for Neal to die because really he’d just made things so much worse ( ~~ _please don’t die I don’t think I could handle it_~~ ), or maybe for a miracle to appear from the heavens and magically stop that from happening.

Neither of those possible scenarios happened, and Peter’s team watched as Neal slowly straightened up, his breathing evening out as he spit black blood out his mouth with a grimace of disgust. The pitch black of the blood was probably just because of the shitty lighting, Peter told himself, ignoring the small voice in his head that whispered _but it isn’t and you know it_.

“Hughes knew where we were, right?” Neal asks, his voice still tinged with a small amount of wet in the throat but much less breathy than before.

Peter gaped. “What the fuck.”

Neal froze, a single brow lifting in surprise at Peter’s profanity, before snorting.

Peter shook his head. “It must be the concussion. I’m hallucinating.”

“If you’re hallucinating then so are Jones and I,” Diana pointed out, still staring at Neal in shock.

“You a meta, Caffrey? It’s not on your file,” Jones asked, tone tense with pain and his eyes narrowed.

Neal shrugged, making his way over to the vet and crouching down to get a look at his ankle. “Not by birth.”

“Why didn’t we know about this?” Peter finally managed. He was choosing to put off acknowledging the emotional trauma of being prepared for his best friend to die for another day.

“You think I’m going to tell a government agency that I can’t die? You do know what they’d do, right?” Neal pointed out dryly, turning to poke at Jones’ ankle. “It’s just sprained,” he told him. “A pretty bad one, but I don’t think it’s worse than a break in this case. You know how to follow RICE protocol, right?”

Jones nodded silently.

Neal grinned. “Great. Now let’s see about getting out of here.”

They were floors below the ground floor, and the only spot of light was several unmanageable feats (and feet) up. Neal narrowed his eyes, studying the rubble build-up speculatively. He shook his head, making a decision against whatever he was thinking about.

“My phone’s smashed,” Diana said, holding up the severely cracked screen with a grimace.

“Good thing mine’s not,” Neal said triumphantly, holding up his own.

“How—No. Nope. Too many questions. Which you _will_ be answering later,” Peter said sternly.

Neal nodded. “I figured. Although I’m pretty sure some of it is…classified? So we’ll have to check that first.”

Peter just sighed. Honestly. Why was it always Neal?

Don’t get him wrong, he’s glad Neal’s not dead, but _still_.

He just knew this was going to turn into a giant headache of epic proportions.

——

Peter was right. It took several hours for them to be recovered, and then another few hours or so before Jones was discharged from the hospital. Peter wasn’t held, either, simply being told to make sure he had some form of supervision for the next week in case anything happened. It took another several hours for them to be granted “proper clearance,” whatever that meant, so by the time everything was over with it was late at night, far past the time others would have gone home, and Peter did indeed have a headache (and not only because of the concussion).

Neal was at the front in one of the side seats spinning lazily, waiting for the others to sit down. Only Hughes, Diana, Jones, and Peter were there, and, though he wouldn’t say he was comfortable telling this many people, he knew it was necessary.

“So are we going to be told what the hell happened earlier?” Diana asked, raising an eyebrow. She had recovered admirably from the earlier shock, quickly adapting to the fact that Neal was apparently a meta who had never told anyone (otherwise he would have worn an inhibitor collar, and he had no such thing).

Hughes nodded. “I would also like to know that. All I’ve been told is that you ‘died but didn’t’.”

Neal hmmed, piecing through his thoughts to organize them into something at least vaguely coherent. “I should start from the beginning. When I was younger, my parents were murdered.”

Peter gasped. He hadn’t expected that to be the beginning, and now he dreaded what came next.

Neal plowed on. “CPS wound up giving me to my grandfather, who I hadn’t known existed. What we didn’t know was that he was part of a secret society—yes, I know,” he said to everyone’s skeptical reactions. “It sounds crazy. Anyway, they were called the Court of Owls. An urban myth that was used as a nursery rhyme to scare the children of the city. They were run by the rich and elite of the city—the old money, and they had their own special…things, to control the city and political atmosphere.”

“What do you mean ‘things’,” Hughes asked, not at all liking where this was going.

Neal grinned, a sharp thing without any humor. “They were called Talons. Assassins. Mutated using a special serum and stored in cryogenic tubes only to be brought out when needed. I was a legacy, and my grandfather was one of the best Talons. They’d been looking for me, and the place I had grown up was raising me with all the skills I’d need—though I didn’t know it at the time.”

“Wait,” Jones interrupted. His crutches were set next to his chair and Neal could see the look of slowly dawning horror on his and the others’ faces. “So….were you…?”

“I was supposed to be the greatest Talon. And I was, for a year after my training was finished. They….” Neal—Dick—really didn’t want to talk about this next bit, but he had gotten this far, right? Besides, they might as well know they were working with a murderer. “They condition you. Make you forget everything except your training and the knowledge that you report to the Court.”

“Oh my god,” Diana breathed. Peter looked like he wanted to do the same.

 _Surprise, I was a murder baby_ , Neal wanted to say, just to get it over with. He didn’t, but it was a near thing. “There was a meeting in the court one night, I think I was stationed as security—or just to show off how twisted they were, I don’t know—and Batman came. He had been tracking them for a while, actually, and he finally managed to dismantle them that night. A…a lot of the Talons died that night, but most of them were barely human anymore.”

“I thought Batman was an urban legend?” Peter asked. Sure, they had all heard about him, and the Justice League said he was a member, but it’s not like anyone had ever _seen_ him.

Dick laughed. “Yeah, no. Very real. He had been looking for me ever since my parents, ever since I vanished with my grandfather, and he took me in and helped…fix me, let’s say, as best he could.”

What Dick didn’t say was that this was after several failed escape attempts and a couple failed murder attempts, but that wasn’t what was important here.

“God, Neal, that’s—” Peter honestly didn’t know what to say, and Dick was okay with that. What _were_ you supposed to say to something like that?

Dick shrugged. “Awful? Horrible? Fucked up? Yeah, you’re not wrong. But I got a pretty decent family out of it, all things considered.”

Diana’s brow furrowed. “Wait, but you’re notorious for being a _nonviolent_ criminal. Why—?”

Dick scoffed before continuing softly, “I never wanted to hurt anyone, Di. It wasn’t my choice, and I hated myself—still do—for everything they made me do. Besides, don’t you think it would be unfair? An elite assassin against a bunch of second-rate criminals who can only throw a basic punch?”

“How was this all not on your file?” Hughes asked sternly.

“I have connections in high places. The last thing we needed was the people looking for me being able to find me because my abilities and mutations were recorded in a prison log or because I was given an inhibitor collar.”

“Why didn’t you break out, if you didn’t have the collar? You probably could have easily escaped, no need for growing a beard or anything else,” Peter said suspiciously.

Dick shrugged. “There are a few reasons. The main one is that I didn’t want to leave a trail for the people looking for me to track. Our deal was a coincidence, but I figured I could use it. What you guys don’t know is that a few of our cases have connections to criminals much higher up on the food chain—as in League high. I let them know.”

“You work with the League?” Diana asked, her eyes wide.

Dick snickered. “Yeah. I’ve been trying to get the clearance to at least tell you guys that much, but they didn’t let me until you saw proof of something off about me. Aside from the whole conman bit.”

While Peter was still very upset about not being told _anything_ , he could, to a degree, understand the necessities of classification.

“Okay, okay, so, briefly ignoring that bombshell because I will need a lot of time to digest it later,” Jones said, eliciting laughter from everyone except Hughes (though don’t let that fool you because he still quirked his lips in amusement). “What exactly _can_ you do? Is the not-dying the only thing or is there more?”

Dick had known this was going to be a question. It wasn’t like it was much of a surprise, since you can’t just say “I have powers” without elaborating on what those powers were, but he still really didn’t want to. “I have some of the basics,” he said. “Enhanced strength, speed, endurance, agility. I also have a fast healing factor, and enhanced eyesight. I have to wear contacts.”

“You have to wear contacts but you have enhanced eyesight?” Diana asked. She needn’t have pointed out the irony, because Dick already knew, but she was curious.

Dick sighed, running a hand through his hair before reaching up and taking out his contacts. When he looked up, his eyes were glowing a bird-like yellow in the dim light of the conference room. “I’m really sensitive to the light, so the contacts work as built-in sunglasses and to hide the color.”

Everyone in the room had either frozen or blinked in surprise, not expecting that.

Finally, “Huh.” Peter was staring. Dick could tell he was slightly weirded out, but there was no disgust or hatred, only blatant curiosity. “Is that why your apartment is so dark,” he finally asked.

Jones and Diana both laughed as Dick pouted. “C’mon Peter.”

“What! It’s a valid question,” Peter protested, looking to the others for support.

“He’s got you there, Caffrey,” Diana snorted.

Dick said nothing, but the twitching of his lips gave away his amusement.

Things would be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> So how was it? I think the beginning is my favorite part but I wanna hear from the rest of you. Anything you think I could have characterized differently or was it pretty good? Also I am not a medical professional I’m only trained in basic first aid so take this all with a grain of salt. 
> 
> I hope you’re all doing well and staying safe and happy!


End file.
